The European Revolutions of 1848, known in some countries as the Spring of Nations or the Year of Revolution, were a series of political upheavals throughout the European continent. Described by some historians as a revolutionary wave, the period of unrest began on 12 January 1848 in Sicily and then, further propelled by the French Revolution of 1848, soon spread to the rest of Europe.

In the spring of 1848 Vienna and Budapest were still in the
grip of the same revolutionary fever. Eyewitnesses describe the enthusiastic
reception given by Vienna to the noble gentlemen arriving by steamboat from
Pressburg on 15 March. They were resplendent in their Hungarian dress uniforms,
with richly decorated swords and egret feathers adorning their caps, and only
Kossuth appeared as always in his simple black national dress. The delegation
brought along the text of the pre-formulated Address to the Throne. The scene
was described by an eyewitness as follows:

In this hour of jubilation the fiery Hungarians, with
Kossuth and Batthyány in the lead, also arrived in Vienna… The jubilation that
broke forth is almost indescribable. Endless shouts of “éljen!” [hurrah]. The
national flag fluttered in the air, and while kerchiefs are waving, garlands
and flowers flying from all the windows in the Jägerzeile and the city, the carriages
slowly proceed along the streets… The next goal of the procession was the
University, where a stirring speech by Kossuth, the brandishing of sabres and a
chorus of acclaim celebrated the joyful avowal of friendship, and raised the
hope that all barriers between Austria’s peoples had fallen and a firm moral
alliance would unite them in the future.

On the morning of 17 March the Emperor-King Ferdinand
assented to Count Lajos Batthyány forming a Hungarian government, as well as
the appointment of Archduke Stefan as his plenipotentiary, and promised to
approve every law passed by the Diet under the direction of the palatine. Apart
from later complications and still open questions, the Hungarian reformers had
achieved this success without bloodshed and, what is more, not through the
Monarchy’s disintegration but in the spirit of independence already recognized
in 1791. The King granted Hungary not only a constitution but also the right of
unification with Transylvania, sovereignty over Croatia-Slavonia and the
re-incorporation of the Military Border.

Within a few weeks the Hungarians had won a great victory.
Even Széchenyi admitted in a confidential letter of 17 March: “Kossuth staked
everything on one card, and has already won as much for the nation as my policy
could have produced over perhaps twenty years.” According to the new
constitution, Hungarian became the official language of the unified state;
comprehensive liberal reforms were introduced and a constitutional government
was appointed, answerable to a representative body that would soon be elected.
After the electoral reform 7–9 per cent of the population received the
franchise instead of the earlier 1.6–1.7 per cent. Considering that even after
the 1832 Reform Bill only 4 per cent of the population of England had voting
rights, the Hungarian achievement was remarkable.

Whether out of idealism or, as in Poland, fear of peasant
uprisings or for a variety of other possible reasons, the nobility waived their
rights of tax exemption, and agreed to the abolition of feudal dues and
services. Thirty-one laws were worked out in feverish haste, which were
supposed to transform the feudal Estate-based state into a Western-style
parliamentary democracy. Hungary was also granted the right to an independent
financial administration, a Foreign Ministry and its own Minister of War.

The new Prime Minister, Count Batthyány, one of the
country’s greatest landowners, was an eminent statesman, even if too moderate
for the Pest radicals and too progressive for Viennese court circles. Kossuth
became Minister of Finance; Széchenyi Minister for Public Works and Transport
(“They will hang me together with Kossuth”, he wrote in his diary); Baron
József Eötvös, the writer and enlightened humanist, Minister for Culture and
Education; Bertalan Szemere Minister of the Interior (later Prime Minister);
and the respected liberal politician Ferenc Deák Minister of Justice. Hungary’s
first constitutional government consisted of four aristocrats and five
representatives of the lesser nobility—all of them rich apart from Kossuth. The
Foreign Minister, the conservative Prince Esterházy, the richest man in the
country, was seen as an extension of the Court; he wanted to neutralize
Kossuth, “that deadly poison”.

Many questions regarding Hungary’s relationship to the
Habsburg Monarchy remained open, such as agreement on the functions of the two
Foreign Ministries and the military authorities. Nonetheless, Batthyány’s
government prepared the way for an impressive surge of economic and cultural development,
liberated the peasants, and at the same time guaranteed the nobility’s economic
survival. The insurrectionist tendencies of workers and peasants were subdued,
as was anti-Semitic rioting. Despite many and increasing tensions, a new and
viable parliament was duly elected, in which the followers of the reform
movement gained the majority. Kossuth proved his extraordinary abilities as a
resolute and conscientious Minister for Finance: under adverse and confusing
conditions he managed to conjure up an independent fiscal administration out of
nothing. His political influence went far beyond his nominal position, not
least because from July he had his own newspaper and from time to time acted as
“leader of the Opposition within the government”.

The fateful questions of the Hungarian Revolution were the
tense relationships with Austria, Croatia and the most important non-Magyar
ethnic groups, such as the Romanians, Serbs and Slovaks. The Hungarians had
always fought against the centralizing efforts of the Court and the Austrian
government, but their own centralizing steps now elicited similar resistance
from the Slavs and Romanians. In contrast to the representatives of national
romanticism. Hungarian historians of our time, such as Domokos Kosáry, emphasize
that the radicalization of these nationalities was not the result of Vienna’s
policies, Pan-Slavism or rabble-rousing foreign agents. These ethnic groups, in
their own social and political development, had reached a similar level of
national feeling and national assertion as the Hungarians, but Kossuth and most
of the authoritative Hungarian politicians were unwilling to accept their
demands. Their principal aim was to secure the territorial unity of the lands
of the crown of St Stephen, not their disintegration; moreover, many Hungarians
lived in the territories claimed by the nationalities, and if they relinquished
them, they would come under foreign dominance. Even the most progressive and
revolutionary Hungarians believed so strongly in the efficacy of social reforms
and the attraction of newly-won freedom that they feared no serious
complications.

The culpability of the Viennese government lay in its
exploitation of the national disagreements to its own advantage, using the
Serbs and Croats supported by Belgrade—then still the capital of an autonomous
principality within the Ottoman Empire—to provoke an armed conflict with
Budapest. The Court wanted from the first to reverse the Hungarian reforms,
which they regarded as a threat to the Monarchy’s unity. It was totally
unimportant to Vienna whether one ethnic group or another achieved what it
wanted; all that mattered was to gain allies against the Hungarians. That is
why the representatives of the nationalities were so disappointed after the
defeat of the Revolution. A Croat allegedly remarked later to a Magyar: “What
you are getting as punishment we are getting as a reward.”

One of the most conspicuous characteristics of the
Revolution and the War of Independence was the confusion in the army, as well
as among the aristocracy and lower strata of the nobility. It tends to be
forgotten that the Hungary of the time had three times the area of today’s
republic, and the Magyars were less than 40 per cent of the population. The
ethnic groups were already demanding autonomy and self-administration in the
spring of 1848, partly—as with the Croats—within Hungary, and partly within the
framework of the House of Habsburg.

The Serbs in Southern Hungary, supported by the principality
of Serbia, made territorial demands, and unleashed an open revolt against the
Buda-Pest government with the help of 10,000 armed “irregulars” in the service
of the Belgrade government, who attacked Hungarian, German and Romanian
settlements indiscriminately. Two-thirds of the Hungarian infantry regiments
were serving abroad, and of the twelve hussar regiments only half were
stationed in Hungary. The Batthyány government requested support from
Imperial-Royal regulars to supplement units of the newly-created Hungarian
National Guard. It turned out later, however, that the Serb border guards were
led by Habsburg officers, flying Imperial-Royal flags. Habsburg units were now
fighting each other. In his much-quoted book on the Hungarian Revolution István
Deák gave a few graphic examples of the problem of distinguishing between
friendly and enemy soldiers and units, and of the moral dilemma facing the
Imperial-Royal officers. The following befell Colonel Baron Friedrich von
Blomberg:

In the summer of 1848 a Habsburg army colonel named
Blomberg—a German national at the head of a regiment of Polish lancers—was
stationed in the Banat, a rich territory in southern Hungary inhabited by
Germans, Magyars, Orthodox and Catholic Serbs, Romanians and Bulgarians.

Confronted by the threat of an attack from Serbian rebels, Blomberg turned to
his commanding general for further instructions. The commander, a Habsburg
general of Croatian nationality though not very favourably disposed to the
Budapest government, instructed the colonel to fight the Grenzer, and the foreign
volunteers. The local Hungarian government commissioner, who happened to be a
Serb, issued an identical order. Blomberg fought successfully, but when the
leader of the Serbian rebels, a Habsburg army colonel of German-Austrian
nationality, reminded Blomberg of his duty to the Emperor and not to the King
(the two, of course were one and the same person), Blomberg ordered his Poles
out of the region, leaving his German co-nationals, who happened to be loyal to
the Hungarians, to the tender mercies of the Serbs. Totally uncertain, Blomberg
now turned to the Austrian Minister of War, writing in a letter: “Have pity on
us, Your Excellency, in our predicament; recall us from this place of
uncertainty. We can no longer bear this terrible dilemma.” But Blomberg was not
recalled because his regiment, so the Austrian Minister of War reminded him in
his reply, was under Hungarian sovereignty. Blomberg was advised instead to
“listen to his conscience”. The territory formerly under his protection was
occupied by the Serbs, not without violence and plundering, yet it was twice
liberated by Hungarians, first under the command of a Habsburg officer of Serb
nationality and later by a Polish general.

Deák adds as a typical footnote that both Blomberg and his
onetime opponent on the Serb side became generals in the Habsburg army, while
the Hungarian government representative and the Polish General Józef Bem went
into exile at the end of the war, and the Hungarian commander of Serb
nationality, General János Damjanich, was hanged by the Austrians.

The strongest organized military resistance against the
Hungarian Revolution came from the Croats. Their spokesman was Josip
Jelačić—who had been promoted shortly before from colonel to general and
appointed ban of Croatia—a Croat patriot, deeply loyal to the Emperor and a
rabid hater of the Hungarians.

Separation from Austria and the deposing of the dynasty was
not at all on the agenda until the autumn of 1848. Thus it was in the interest
of the so-called “Camarilla”, the reactionary Court party and the high military
in Vienna, with Jelačić as their most important and determined tool, to create
an unholy confusion by their intrigues among the officer corps and the simple
soldiers. Immediately after his appointment the new ban refused to comply with
the orders of the Hungarian Prime Minister and the Minister of War. The latter,
Colonel Lázár Mészáros, was not even in Buda-Pest at the time but fighting in
Italy under Field-Marshal Radetzky in the Emperor’s service, and could not take
up his post until May because Radetzky did not want him to leave Italy. In the
mean time, with the agreement of the Emperor, the Hungarians declared Jelačić a
rebel, and on the urging of the Buda-Pest government relieved him of all his
posts. Barely three months later the Croat general was again on top—as the
spearhead of the Austrian attack.

The course of that critical summer demonstrates how complex
and confusing the Hungarian War of Independence was for the participants on
both sides. The resolutions of the newly-elected parliament in Buda-Pest such
as creating a separate (honvéd) army, a separate national budget and issuing
banknotes were a provocation to the Imperial government.

On 11 July 1848 Lajos Kossuth, nominally “only” Minister of
Finance, gave the most significant speech in Hungarian history. He was ill with
fever and had to be supported as he mounted the dais in the Parliament at
Buda-Pest; and when he left it around mid-day all the deputies jumped
enthusiastically to their feet. In a voice which was at first a whisper but
soon rose to its full strength, he spoke about Croatia, the Serbs, the Russian
menace, and relations with Austria, England, France and the new German state.
All his arguments were directed at just one end: that Parliament should vote a
credit of 42 million gulden for the establishment of a 200,000-man national
army. Kossuth pulled out all the stops, and witnesses regarded the speech as a
masterpiece of rhetoric.

“Gentlemen! (Calls of ‘Sit down!’ to which he answered Only
when I get tired.’) As I mount the rostrum to demand that you will save the
country, the momentous nature [of this moment] weighs fearfully upon me. I feel
as if God had handed me a trumpet to awaken the dead, so that those who are
sinners and weaklings sink to eternal death, but those with any vital spark
left in them may rise up for eternity! Thus at this moment the fate of the
nation is in the balance. With your vote on the motion. I am placing before
your God has confided to you the power to decide the life or death of the
nation. You will decide. Because this moment is so awe-inspiring I shall not
resort to weapons of rhetoric… Gentlemen, our Fatherland is in danger!”

In his oration Kossuth depicted the Serb and Croat danger
and the dynasty’s underhand attitude (with ironic asides about the “collision”
between the Austrian Emperor and Hungarian King combined in the same person),
to heighten the impression of Hungary’s isolation in the Europe of the day. He
spoke of England, which would support the Magyars only if it was in its
interest. Kossuth then expressed his “deepest empathy” with the trailblazers of
freedom, but he did not wish to see Hungary’s fate dependent on protection from
France: “Poland too relied on French sympathy and that sympathy was probably
real, yet Poland no longer exists!”

Finally Kossuth spoke of relations with the German
Confederation. The Hungarians, still harbouring illusions, sent two politicians
to the Frankfurt Assembly. They hoped that Austria would join the German
Confederation, believing that in that case the Pragmatic Sanction of 1722–3
would become null and void, and Austria-Hungary could then settle its own fate.
The King would reside in Buda and an independent Hungarian monarchy could be
preserved. According to Hungarian sources, as late as May even the Austrians
believed in a German-Austrian-Hungarian alliance against the Slavs. Be that as
it may, Kossuth made no bones about the importance he attached to an alliance
with Germany:

“I say openly that I feel this is a natural truth: that the
Hungarian nation is destined to live in a close and friendly relationship with
the free German nation, and the German nation is destined to do the same with
the free Hungarian nation, united to watch over the civilization of the East… But
because the Frankfurt Assembly was still experiencing birth-pangs, and nobody
had yet developed the form in which negotiations could have been brought to a
conclusion—and this could happen only with the ministry formed after the
election of the Regent—one of our delegates is still there to seize the first
moment when somebody is available with whom one can get into official contact
to start negotiations about the amicable alliance which should exist between
ourselves and Germany—but in a way that does not require us to deviate even by
an inch from our independence and our national liberty.”

After the frenzied applause at the end of the speech, with
which his request for the necessary funds was answered (“We shall give it!” the
deputies shouted, rising to their feet), the weary Kossuth, moved to tears,
concluded:

“This is my request! You have risen as one man, and I
prostrate myself before the nation’s greatness. If your energy in execution
equals the patriotism with which you have made this offer, I am bold enough to
say that even the gates of hell shall not prevail against Hungary!”

Despite Kossuth’s pessimistic assessment of the European
situation and the ebbing of the revolutionary tide from France to Poland, the
radical Left put the government under pressure. It should, first and foremost,
refuse the King’s request to provide 40,000 recruits from Hungary to suppress
the Italian war of independence. The cabinet was split, and the differences
between the moderate Batthyány and the energetic and determined Kossuth became
increasingly sharp and undisguised. Vacillation over the question of the
recruits further fanned the flames of conflict with the dynasty—for which,
meanwhile, the situation had vastly improved. In Prague Field-Marshal
Windisch-Graetz had defeated a revolt by the Czechs. Hungarian politicians did
not recognize—or, if they did, it was too late—the psychological and political
significance of the ageing Field-Marshal Radetzky’s victory at Custozza over
the Piedmontese army and the effect the re-conquest of Lombardy would have on
Austrian morale.

The die was cast on 11 September 1848, when 50,000 Croat
soldiers, border guards and national guardsmen entered Hungary led by General
Jelačić, whom the Emperor had reinstated the previous week. They crossed the
river Dráva and advanced towards Budapest flying black and yellow flags,
covertly encouraged by members of the court and the Viennese Minister of War.
In this war Habsburg generals were leading troops against Habsburg generals,
or—as the Hungarian aristocrat Count Majláth aptly described the confused
situation in the summer of 1848—“the King of Hungary had declared war on the
King of Croatia while the Emperor of Austria remained neutral, and these three
monarchs were one and the same person.”

In these days Kossuth made a round-trip across the Great Hungarian
Plain which had immense political and psychological importance. He addressed
crowds in settlements and villages, and recruited thousands of volunteers for
the honvéd army. This tour was a unique experience in the lives of the
peasants, as is amply reflected in Hungarian literature and art. No one else
for a century held such powerful appeal for the dour and suspicious people of
the Puszta. Almost every community of any size named a street after Kossuth or
erected a monument to him. He lives on in folksong to this day:

Lajos Kossuth—golden
lamb,

Golden letters on his
back;

Whoever is able to
read them,

Can become his son.

Lajos Kossuth is a
writer

Who needs no
lamplight.

He can write his
letter

In the soft glow of
starlight.

During the September days Kossuth was already playing a
leading role in every particular. He managed to obtain the House’s consent for
the election of a small permanent committee to assist the Prime Minister; this
soon became the National Defence Committee, which on 8 October took over the
government under the leadership of Kossuth as its newly-elected President.

The court no longer regarded the government as Hungary’s
legitimate representative, and appointed Field-Marshal Count Ferenc Lamberg, a
moderate Hungarian magnate, as royal commissioner and commander-in-chief of all
armed forces in Hungary. Simultaneously, a little-known politician was
entrusted with forming a new government in place of Batthyány’s. Meanwhile the
palatine as well as Batthyány resigned. Lamberg’s appointment, not endorsed by
the acting Prime Minister, caused general indignation, and shortly after his
arrival from Vienna, in broad daylight, the “traitor” was dragged from his
carriage by an enraged mob and lynched.

King Ferdinand immediately dissolved the National Assembly,
declared a state of siege, and appointed General Jelačić royal plenipotentiary
and commander-in-chief. However, Jelačić could not assume the absolute powers
conferred on him because on 29 September his army was beaten by a Hungarian
unit at Pákozd near Pest, and his troops were now marching not towards
Pest-Buda but in the opposite direction. Just over a week later the Second
Croatian Army suffered a shattering defeat at Ozora south of Lake Balaton. Both
victories, which temporarily saved the capital and the Revolution, were
celebrated in poetry and drama.

Several days later, again on Kossuth’s recommendation,
Parliament declared the royal manifesto null and void. Open war between Hungary
and Austria was now inevitable. On that day Kossuth’s reign began: between
September 1848 and April 1849, as president of the National Defence Committee,
he became de facto “temporary dictator dependent on parliament”, i.e. for the
duration of the crisis.

Kossuth was not only the political leader, but also the
inspiration, the organizer and the chief propagandist of the fight. That the
Revolution was carried through into a War of Independence and that the nation
chose the road of armed resistance, was doubtless due in the first place to the
charismatic aura of this veritable tribune of the people. Much has been written
by historians and former associates about his negative traits: his jealousy and
vanity, coldness and egotism, his inability to put himself in the place of
opponents, and lack of understanding of the concerns of the nationalities. His
illusions about foreign politics are perhaps best explained by the fact that
until 1849 he had never set foot anywhere west of Vienna. Of his generals he
encouraged incompetent ones and persecuted Artúr Görgey, the most gifted; he
drove them into battle when all hope of winning the war has gone.

Why then did people forgive Kossuth everything? He was the
liberator personified; he was the one who did away with the last vestiges of
feudalism, freed the peasants, emancipated the Jews, promoted industry. But
above all he embodied—not only for his compatriots—the concept of independence.

The Vienna October Revolution was a turning-point in
Austrian history, with far-reaching consequences for Hungary’s future as well.
The rising of workers and students broke out on 6 October. The spark that
ignited the tinderbox of accumulated discontent was the mutiny of a Grenadier
battalion of the Viennese garrison, which the Minister of War, Latour, wanted
to send to the aid of Jelačić in Hungary. Latour himself was attacked and
lynched in the Ministry building and his mangled corpse was strung up on a
lamppost. The Emperor, the Court and the highest officials fled to Olmütz in
Moravia.

The appeal by the revolutionary German poet Ferdinand Freiligrath
in his poem “Wien” (Vienna) to the Germans to rise up was just as futile as the
hope that the Hungarian revolutionary troops would succeed in relieving Vienna
from the besieging Imperial troops. The Austrian-Croatian Imperial Army
defeated the somewhat reluctantly advancing small Hungarian force at Schwechat.
On 31 October Field-Marshal Windisch-Graetz marched into Vienna, drowned the
uprising in a bloodbath, and set up a military dictatorship which lasted till
1853. The Polish revolutionary General Józef Bem managed to flee, but First
Lieutenant Messenhauser who had refused to turn his guns against the people,
was executed together with a number of radicals, among them Robert Blum, a deputy
of the Frankfurt Assembly.

Both sides now armed for war. Austria had gained a new prime
minister in the person of the diplomat and general Prince Felix Schwarzenberg,
incidentally brother-in-law of the ambitious Windisch-Graetz: he was, in Robert
A. Kann’s assessment, “an adventurer and political gambler”. Radetzky
controlled Northern Italy and Windisch-Graetz became commander-in-chief of the
impending campaign against the Hungarian rebels.

Schwarzenberg, together with Archduchess Sophie, succeeded
in persuading Emperor Ferdinand to abdicate in favour of Archduke Franz, his
eighteen-year-old nephew and the Archduchess’s son. The change of rulers took
place on 2 December 1848. The arrogant and imperialistic Schwarzenberg
(Széchenyi called him a “cold-blooded vampire”) was determined once and for all
to downgrade Hungary to the level of a province. The new Emperor, who added to
his name that of Joseph to signify his recognition of enlightened
“Josephinismus”, relied on Schwarzenberg as he did on none of his subsequent
advisers. The consequences of this reliance were more than questionable: thus,
for example, the forcible dissolution of the Austrian Reichstag at Kremsier and
the arrest of several deputies in March 1849.

Meanwhile the Magyars refused in mid-December to recognize
the new Emperor as their king, because he had not been crowned with the Crown
of St Stephen and did not feel bound by the royal oath of his predecessors.
Kossuth had not intended this conclusive break, but probably welcomed it.

In December Austrian troops attacked Hungary from all sides.
A peace mission to Vienna of moderate Hungarian politicians, among them the
former Prime Minister Batthyány and the Minister of Justice Deák, failed;
Windisch-Graetz refused even to receive them. The Hungarians were fenced in
from all sides. Parts of the Austrian army under General Schlick attacked from
Galicia in the north, and in the south-west the Romanians and Saxons joined the
offensive. The Serbs advanced from the south, the Croats approached across the
Dráva and the Danube, and Windisch-Graetz struck from the west. They occupied
Buda-Pest in January 1849, and Kossuth fled with the deputies and
officials—altogether about 2,000—to Debrecen, 220 km. to the east. The
provisional capital was no more than a giant village, with only a single doctor
in private practice, but as a centre of Calvinism it counted not only as the
most distant town from the attacking Austrian army, but also as a symbol of
resistance to the Catholic Habsburgs.

By the end of 1848 all appeared lost for the Magyars; the
Austrians believed they had throttled the Hungarian Revolution “as in the coils
of a boa-constrictor”, as Friedrich Engels wrote in the Neue Rheinische
Zeitung. Yet the Hungarians fought on with ever-increasing ferocity, though
with varying success. Windisch-Graetz proved a rather ineffective commander,
and fell victim to his own vanity as well as to the tactical superiority of the
Hungarian revolutionary generals. After a strategically unimportant victory at
Kápolna, to the east of Buda-Pest, over troops led by the Polish General Henryk
Dembinski, Windisch-Graetz believed that the Hungarians had been finally
beaten, and in a report to the Court, which was still at Olmütz, announced his
imminent entry into Debrecen. This ill-considered move led to the abovementioned
imposed constitution of 4 March, which gave the resisting Hungarians an
enormous psychological boost to their by now victorious military campaign
against Austria.

On 14 April 1849 the Hungarians replied to the proclamation
of the octroied (granted) constitution, which eliminated Hungary’s ancient
rights and denied it Croatia-Slavonia, Dalmatia and Transylvania, with a
psychologically understandable but politically unwise “Declaration of
Independence”. In it the parliament in the great Calvinist church at Debrecen
proclaimed the dethronement of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, Kossuth was
unanimously elected provisional Head of State with the title of
“Governor-President” and Bertalan Szemere Minister of the Interior.

Hungary was isolated, yet its army fought on with such
success that many people spoke of a “springtime miracle”. One of the
revolutionaries’ principal demands was the creation of a national army with
Hungarian as the language of command. Commands, however, still had to be
drafted and conveyed in German, because many of the key officers did not
understand a word of Hungarian. One of Kossuth’s most devoted associates was
the Englishman General Richard Guyon, who had been a first lieutenant in a
Hungarian hussar regiment before the Revolution and who, having a Hungarian
wife, had become an ardent Magyar patriot. Another of the numerous foreign
professional officers was General Count Karl Leiningen-Westerburg, a member of
the Hessian ruling house and related to the Coburgs and hence the English royal
house; through marriage and predilection he also became Hungarian.

In the autumn of 1849 close on 50,000 members of the
Imperial-Royal army were fighting on the Hungarian side, including about 1,500
professional officers. These regular units were not integrated into the new
honvéd army; the soldiers kept their uniforms, leading to tragicomic
misunderstandings, since it was often impossible to differentiate between
friend and foe. The bugle and drum signals, the drill and, as already mentioned,
the language of command remained the same. At least 1,000 officers or
approximately 10 per cent of the Habsburg officer corps decided in favour of
the Hungarian cause.

The military historian Gábor Bona estimates that of the
honvéd army’s 830 generals and staff officers 15.5 per cent were Germans, 4.2
per cent Poles and 3.6 per cent Serbs and Croats. The cosmopolitan character of
the revolutionary force was maintained from the hopeful beginning to the bitter
end of the War of Independence. Hungarians of German origin (excluding the
Transylvanian Saxons) generally stood by the Magyars, as did many Slovaks and,
without exception, the Jews who hoped for emancipation. About 3,000 Poles, many
of them officers, fought for the Magyars.

But it was first and foremost Kossuth who, with his dynamism
and incorrigible optimism, supplied the motley army with tens of thousands of
recruits, with arms and munitions from abroad, and eventually created a war
industry out of nothing. By June 1849 Kossuth succeeded in mustering a honvéd
army of 170,000.

At a time when the tide of revolution was receding and
reaction was being consolidated, the Hungarians’ dazzling victories in the
spring of 1849, culminating in May in the reconquest of the capital, moved all
of Europe. In Germany Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Heinrich Heine and Ferdinand
Freiligrath, among many others, took a deep interest. The first edition of the
Neue Rheinische Zeitung for the year opened with Freiligrath’s poem “Ungarn”,
extolling the Hungarians’ fighting spirit. The unconditional support of Marx
and Engels for the Magyars was connected with their admiration for the last
active revolutionary movement. Engels wrote in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung:
“For the first time in a very long time there is a truly revolutionary
personality, a man, who dares to take up the gauntlet of the desperate fight
for his people, who is a Danton and a Carnot combined for his nation—Lajos
Kossuth.”

Pages

Ian Cunningham

Dedication

Followers

About Me

Mitch Williamson is a technical writer with an
interest in military and naval affairs. He has published articles in
Cross & Cockade International and Wartime magazines. He was
research associate for the Bio-history Cross in the Sky, a book about
Charles 'Moth' Eaton's career, in collaboration with the flier's son,
Dr Charles S. Eaton. He also assisted in picture research for John
Burton's Fortnight of Infamy.
Mitch is now publishing on the WWW various specialist websites combined
with custom website design work.